The data comes from the W3C Schools browser statistics page. The "Months from 10.2% Overlap" is referring to the two points where browser usage of IE5 and IE6 were both at 10.2% (time-shifted so you can see how similar the data is). The W3C site appears to stop tracking browsers at 0.5% (I'm calling that dead). My goal with this chart is to show that the data is rather similar at this point in time.

Six years is a pretty bleak outlook. I also had Excel fit a line to the chart and came up with "y = -0.0093x + 0.085" with a R^2 of 0.9854 (a slightly better fit with the available data nodes). With the line, IE6 is declared dead by the W3C Schools' standard of 0.5% in 8.5 months. So, the real answer is probably somewhere between 8.5 months and six years. I'm leaning more toward five years.…

I've been on a kick lately with transparent PNGs. Due to recent discoveries involving PNG8, it is high time to revisit the world of PNGs and see what else there is out there. In my previous article on PNG8, I discussed how to get nice-looking PNG8 images by using Photoshop and pngquant. Most articles on PNG8 only cover either Fireworks or straight-up pngquant/some other command-line tool. The results aren't that great looking.

Today, I stumbled across this website and tried it out in IE6. Surprisingly, the first 24-bit transparent PNG "worked":

Why is this interesting? Because a pink background shows up. We are all so used to that ugly gray background in IE6 that no one has stopped to think that maybe the background color can be altered. Instead, people have gone for various hacky solutions to get full transparency. Well, now there is an intermediate, no-hacks solution between the full transparency hacks and PNG8.